


chalk marks show up on a few high windowsills

by Sarah T (SarahT)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-23
Updated: 2012-01-23
Packaged: 2017-10-31 11:52:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/343743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SarahT/pseuds/Sarah%20T
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Damn John Watson, Irene Adler, and all their works.</p>
            </blockquote>





	chalk marks show up on a few high windowsills

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Spike and Livia for betas. ~2700 words.

It's some time before Sherlock realizes that he's analyzing, out of the corner of his eye, the man seated across from him in the depths of the café. Tired, slumped against the chair: hasn't slept well in weeks. Signs of weight loss at wrists and cheeks: recently ill, perhaps. Clothes shabby, travel-worn, mismatched: someone who's been travelling internationally, but for no wholesome purpose. As he's begun to do lately, Sherlock blanks briefly on the purpose: drugs? the traffic in Natashas? more old-fashioned forms of smuggling?

What did it matter? Whatever his profession, clearly the sort of undesirable character formed by endless low-level deprivation and anxiety. Even in the fog of his weariness, Sherlock feels a loathing, a sudden desire to be away from this creature. He stands up and reaches for his jacket, only to realize with dismay that the man has, as well. A thug, looking for an easy target? One of Moriarty's people? Only one way to find out. He slides his hand into his pocket to touch the knife as he strides towards the door.

As he pushes it open, he turns his head back in a natural gesture, to see if he's being followed.

The man is gone.

There's no one looking at him at all. Just the reflection of himself standing by the door, in the mirror that lines the back of the café.

Sherlock's hand trembles as he pulls the door shut behind him.

 

An understandable mistake, he tells himself. He really hasn't slept for days, he knows all about how sleep deprivation impairs the judgment as surely as any intoxicant might. And a year of this life (a year? A _year_? Four hundred and twelve _days_ ) would disorient anyone. A different country every few days, a different look in every place, a different name and cover for every cell of Moriarty's organization he infiltrates. Suspicion eating away at every observation, every second—he can't even tell for certain, until the precise moment the packet is handed over, that his occasional connect (always anonymous, never the same person) is Mycroft's agent, and not Moriarty's. And, constantly, the endless babble of foreign tongues roaring in his ears. He's a castaway in his own mind; the only thing that keeps him Sherlock any longer is his own belief in himself.

Castaways go mad. Sherlock is not going mad. But, he thinks, he _is_ wasting away. If he can't rely on his own strength, the game is over.

He sits on a park bench in the great square, elbows on knees, cataloging the pigeons and the other miserable beings haunting the place. Beggars and pickpockets and the elderly; despite the welter of distinguishing details that each carries, they're starting to look the same in every place. Reality is wearing bare under his constant fingering.

One of the local drunkards—at least, Sherlock thinks he's a drunkard and not a pedophile out to watch the children careening through the square—asks him in the local language for a light. Sherlock reaches into his pocket automatically, before remembering that he hasn't smoked in years. And this cover identity doesn't, either. But there it is, along with the packet he's already gone through half of today. Another giveaway.

The man grunts when Sherlock shakes his head. Something must have shown on his face, because he spits, "Think you're better than me? I know you. Know what you're here for." Sherlock's heart stops, but then the man staggers away.

There's only one solution to this.

Instinct leads him to where he needs to go, a narrow cobblestoned alley where a young man stands nonchalantly, both hands in his pockets. Clearly taking Sherlock for a fellow lowlife, he rattles off prices in a bored tone while keeping a stance just barely braced against the odd possibility of a robbery.

Cocaine has always been Sherlock's preference, but it's too risky here. He might draw too much attention to himself. No, it will have to be opiates tonight. The dealer doesn't show any surprise at his selection. Evidently, Sherlock muses, he looks like someone who would inject heroin. It's been a long time since that has been true.

He returns to his little room at the top of five flights of stairs. The air is choked with the smell of mildew, so he forces the single filthy window the three inches it can move. He sits down on the bed, puts the single plate on the rickety bedside table, and lays a glassine packet in its exact center.

He has the works in his hand, but he stares at the packet for a long time without moving. Please, he thinks. The word is rusty in his head from disuse, as startling as a coral-crusted scabbard fetched up from the depths. Please, please, please.

The thought hangs in the air, with no response. When he finally injects the drug, indifference slides through his system. It's such a relief. He lies back, clutching the worn and none-too-clean-smelling blanket against the chill seeping into the room. He knows that soon every desire will be diluted to nothing, and he can rest.

 

Mycroft has to walk; there's no helping it; but the inefficiency makes him irritable. There's such a small window before he has to be seen at the conference in Brussels, and so much time is already gone.

The visit to the house of ill repute had been mandatory: it will provide the requisite illicit motivation if his trip here is ever discovered. They'd sent in a boy who, they'd said, was seventeen and local, but who was obviously two years younger and from one of the rural precincts. Mycroft had given him cigarettes and questioned him about his home town, filing away the details even as he watched the door. When enough minutes had passed, he sighed and stood. Time to justify the visit. He slapped the boy again and again, steady as a metronome, watching the faint life that had come into his eyes as he'd spoken of his boyhood haunts die away again into the dull sense that life was nothing more than endurance. He'd concluded with a punch to the solar plexus that doubled the boy over. He'd left immediately afterwards, paying precisely what he'd been quoted, no more.

He grimaces. He's not responsible for each sparrow that falls.

He clutches a newspaper in his left hand as he walks through the streets. He has an address filed away in his memory, but he prefers to rely on his observations, to see the city as Sherlock must have seen it, to let that understanding guide him to the place that Sherlock would have chosen. With him, even more so than with his brother, the distinction between deduction and intuition can be very difficult to draw. And he needs to _understand_ so much more than an address on a scrap of paper can tell him.

The oppressive feeling at his ribcage tells him he's found the right quarter. He recognizes the building at once by the way his thoughts resolve into despair at the sight of it. Sherlock would be faring better at the brothel. In the lobby, the raw odor of ammonia barely covers a scent of vomit, and the first flight of stairs is smeared with a sticky substance he refuses to permit himself to identify. He pauses on the landing, suddenly nauseated. He wishes he had his handkerchief; or his umbrella; or even his pocket watch. In a jumper and corduroys and scuffed old workmen's shoes, he feels impossibly vulnerable to the fetid atmosphere.

He trudges up the rest of the stairs, thinking that Sherlock had probably made himself this inaccessible to him on purpose, out of spite. He deliberately makes a fair amount of noise opening the door that must be the right one. The agent had thought heroin, not cocaine, but it was impossible to be sure, and he doesn't want his skull cracked by Sherlock in a manic fit.

As he steps inside, he can see he needn't have bothered. Sherlock is curled up on the bed, facing away from him, half-tangled in a filthy blanket. Mycroft has seen grainy surveillance pictures, but the reality is so much worse—thin, so thin, hair chopped brutally short and recolored so many times it looks like nothing so much as dirty straw, skin mottled with cold and grey with malnutrition.

It's worse than the many times Mycroft had rousted him out of some miserable squat when he was a junkie. So much worse, because he'd had so much further to fall this time. So much worse, because Sherlock is stirring, looking back over his shoulder at him, and mumbling, in a blank, cracked tone, "Mycroft."

"Were you expecting someone else?" Mycroft shuts the door.

Sherlock flops over. Hair lank, chin stubbled, clothes a rumpled mess: a three-day bender, then. The smudged condition of the glass of water by the bed and the number of empty food wrappers only confirms it.

He says dully, without his usual malicious enthusiasm, "You look like an out-of-work HVAC technician."

"And you look like a long-term resident of a tuberculosis ward."

His head sags back down onto his arm. "Was starting to think you didn't exist anymore. You never…"

"Sherlock, we agreed on the handling protocol. Direct communication is far too risky." Mycroft wedges the door more firmly closed, trying to press down on his irritation as well. "Besides, when have you ever been happy to hear from me?"

Sherlock mutters something inaudible into his sleeve. Mycroft spies the packet on the floor and holds it up to the light.

"I would have thought," he says, "that during this particular and very trying period of your life, I would at least be spared worry about your resorting to your usual means of alleviating boredom."

"I wasn't bored, Mycroft."

"No?"

"Just…" He hesitates, and shuts his eyes. "Just _tired_."

Mycroft swallows. He'd been afraid of this. The one item he can't supply through a highly-developed courier network. The one item he's afraid he can't supply at all.

"All right," he says, easing the rucksack from his shoulders. Practical matters. The things he remembers from his own days in the field: the night when he'd come back from Sarajevo and nearly crawled into the Meurice, dazed and disheveled, to sleep for three straight days. "Up with you."

Sherlock blinks. "What?"

"That…manger you're lying in. A tramp would find it objectionable. Up."

Sherlock frowns, but obeys. Mycroft helps him over to the wall, which Sherlock simply slides down. Then he tucks a sheet hastily over the mattress, replaces the pillow case, and unfolds an old woolen blanket. The old bed linens he heaps into a pile which he briefly considers setting on fire.

"Pyjamas," he says, holding them out.

Mycroft doesn't turn away as Sherlock changes. It's his responsibility to catalog everything, from the visible ribs, to the raw scar on his arm from the knife fight in Istanbul, to the three nearly-flayed knuckles from the time he'd been caught in Estonia ( _certainly_ not consistent with the version he'd given his contact afterwards). Sherlock seems indifferent to his gaze, all his vanity battered away. It's that injury that gives Mycroft the cold feeling in his stomach.

"All right." He puts his hands on Sherlock's shoulders and walks him back to the now-marginally-more-habitable bed. Sherlock stretches a little, involuntarily, against the feeling of the linens, which despite their roughness must be softer than he's known for weeks. A few seconds later, he's nodded off completely.

 

Mycroft uses the time to gather up the packets, including the two cleverly concealed in the light fixture, and takes out a lighter. One by one, he holds the flame to the corner of the packet and then flings it out the window, watching the wind catch it and carry it along like an ash from heaven.

Just for a moment, he indulges a vision of the whole city in flames. Sodom and Gomorrah. London in 1666. Dresden. He shivers and defers it.

Then he slips out into the hallway to brace himself. It's worse than he'd thought. He silently damns John Watson and Irene Adler, the pair of them and all their works. He wants _his_ little brother back, the one who at least believed in his own invulnerability, no matter how illusory it had been.

He also desperately wants a cigarette. He hadn't missed the faint scent in the room. He considers it for a minute, then shrugs and reaches into his jacket's inner pocket. He'd brought them for Sherlock, but Sherlock is obviously past the point at which nicotine could make a difference.

He thinks again of the Meurice. How the Parisians had stared. He'd gone home afterwards. Mummy had made sure the cook made all his favorites. The richness had gagged him. He hadn't been able to eat a bite.

He'd lived on nicotine that summer, and lost all of whatever tendency he'd had towards softness. Not that Sherlock would ever acknowledge it. For some reason, he could never let it be, kept jabbing at Mycroft's weight as if the loss were too great an affront for him to acknowledge.

Useless thoughts, unless they were to prepare him against overeating back in Brussels. He stubs out the cigarette, draws himself together, and steps back into the room.

Sherlock's lying on his back. His eyes open as Mycroft comes in, but he keeps them fixed on the ceiling. "What a hypocrite you are, lecturing me about my vices."

"I'm the older brother," Mycroft says, trying for humor. "It's my prerogative to be more wicked."

Sherlock actually chuckles, which is a puzzle until he follows up, with affected casualness, "How is John?"

Mycroft comes to sit on the edge of the bed. "We agreed that, too," he reminds him.

The amusement drops away at once. "Did we? That doesn't sound like me."

"We most certainly did."

Sherlock tosses to his side, sullen. Chilled himself, Mycroft discards his shoes and slips his feet under the blanket. Sherlock wraps his arms around himself and tucks his chin into his chest, but at least he doesn't fling away the cover and stalk off. Mycroft is debating whether to rest his hand on Sherlock's shoulder when he speaks again.

"This is how you've always wanted it, isn't it?" he says, bitterly, through the haze. "I've got nothing left but you."

Mycroft's hand freezes and then jerks away.

Sherlock has always been all _he_ had.

He's always been able to content himself with that.

What is he doing here?

"There's food and a new passport and money in the rucksack," he says, lips numb. "Try not to spend it all on self-destruction. You're expected in Krakow on Thursday."

He sits to collect himself a moment, then pushes the blanket back. Sherlock twists his head around to look at him, muzzily surprised. "You're going?"

Mycroft gets up, not answering. Not looking.

"Mycroft. _Mycroft._ "

For once in your life, don't demand the last word, he thinks. Just once. Just stop this.

"If you're just going to turn around and leave, why did you even come?"

Mycroft's patience snaps. "I _came_ because the agent told me you'd been seen buying—"

He stops.

Sherlock would have known he was being observed. He would have known Mycroft would have heard about it. He would have known that if anything could persuade Mycroft to abandon the protocol they'd been so painfully following, it would have been the story of his little brother's relapse.

A desperate message, flashed across Europe: _I can't keep doing this on my own._ Terrifying. Better than an apology. Not something he has the power to resist.

Mycroft sighs and sits back down on the bed. His hand finds the back of Sherlock's neck by instinct. "This would have been much easier three years ago."

There's a pause, and then Sherlock asks softly, "Will you teach me how to stop caring again?"

It startles a laugh out of him. "I'm not sure _I_ remember."

"Come on. Pretend I'm eight and Daniel Kebler has stolen my specimen case."

It had been up to him to get them through that, too. He slides down against the pillow, gathers Sherlock close. "You mustn't mind about other people, Sherlock," he begins, as if it were as innocuous as _Once upon a time_. "Emotion and observation are mortal foes…"


End file.
